[The new Iowa Review archive] contains the full text of virtually all the writing published in The Iowa Review from its founding in 1970 through 2011. The archive comprises 130 issues of the magazine and 5,752 individual poems, essays, and stories, searchable by volume, author name, and title. The site also includes links to the most frequently downloaded pieces, as well as a world map displaying real-time readership.

Issues from the most recent three years continue to remain accessible only to subscribers, bookstore patrons, and those who order copies through our website.

We partnered with the University of Iowa Libraries’ Iowa Research Online service, which preserves and provides open access to the UI’s scholarly and creative work, and the digital library JSTOR, which creates a digital archive of the magazine’s back issues. UI digital scholarship librarian Wendy Robertson developed the site’s data infrastructure and user interface.

We have, since 2010, been making WWQRarticles available on the Walt Whitman Archive, where they are linked to the Archive’s bibliography of Whitman scholarship. Readers, then, can access WWQR journal articles either on the Archive site or on the WWQR site maintained by Iowa Research Online. This past year, I began discussions with members of the WWQR Advisory Board, with digital librarians at Iowa, and with my RAs, about moving the journal entirely online as a fully open-access publication. There was surprisingly little resistance and in fact some very real enthusiasm, and the decision solved what were becoming increasingly problematic financial concerns. The costs of printing and distributing the print copies, as well as the costs of paying for a subscription fulfillment service, were steadily increasing, even while our subscriber base was holding steady. To make the transition, we have added compositing work to the tasks the WWQR RA now handles, and our first issue—the first number of volume 33 of the journal—appears this week, appropriately, as a contribution to Open Access Week. In collaboration with the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio, we have added color and undertaken some modest re-design in order to create a new look that works effectively online while also maintaining the feel of the thirty-three-year-old journal.

Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.